Georgette Braun: Borrowing and selling live on at pawn shop

I’ve been a big garage-sale and thrift-store shopper the past dozen years, but I’d never set foot in a pawn shop before Tuesday.

I’d thought of pawn shops as places I might run into unsavory characters, and the stuff that was being sold would be too high-priced or too used.

But with “Pawn Stars” and “Hardcore Pawn” helping me and more people understand the business, I thought I’d give it a whirl.

I’m looking for a big flat-screen TV for our living room.

At the three Rockford pawn stores I visited, I didn’t find the year-or-so-old, 60-inch Panasonic flat-screen for less than $500 that I’ve been dreaming about. Yes, there were lots of other TVs at Easy Cash Solutions, 5011 E. State St., as well as DVD players, tools, guitars, watches, Rollerblades and a size 4 diamond ring marked down from $15,844.99 to $7,922.99. I spotted a gently used Coach purse for $99.99. It wasn’t really my style, I reasoned.

But I did discover something I was hoping to not find:

The Great Recession that started in December 2007 and officially ended in July 2009 is still alive and well for too many local folks who rely on Rockford pawn shops as a financial means of last resort.

For example, at Money Market Pawn Inc., 1012 18th Ave., half of the 35 or so people who sell items there daily or get loans — merchandise they bring in is held as collateral if they fail to repay the loan — haven’t done so there before. That’s not as big a percentage as five years ago, during the recession’s height, but it’s more than it was a year or two after the place opened a decade ago, owner Matt Sigley told me.

In 2008 and 2009, engineers and people with degrees who’d lost their jobs were selling family jewelry and “whatever they had to to keep their houses.” Now, he said, a typical customer is one who gets paid every other week or a contractor who gets paid when the job is done and needs money to tide him over.

The national average loan amount is $150, according to the National Pawnbrokers Association. And pawn customers repay their loans and redeem their collateral at an average national redemption rate of 85 percent.

Rockford pawn shops typically offer 30-day money loans at 20 percent interest. The loans are based on a discounted amount for what the store operators believe the collateral is worth for retail sale.

Teresa Strathman of South Beloit, who is retired but used to teach art, got a loan a month ago for $36 to buy medicine and gas. She returned Tuesday to Money Market to repay the loan and retrieve a Schwinn bike she put up as collateral. She valued the bike at $400. “I never thought I’d use a pawn store,” she told me.

Joe Johnson, 22, of Rockford, who works at a restaurant, sold a bass guitar at Easy Cash Solutions for $40. The past few years he hadn’t played the instrument he paid $200 for, including a case and amplifier. “I needed the extra cash,” he said.

Jordan Dahlberg, manager of Bobby’s on Broadway, 1327 Broadway, said people are pawning items more than they were before the recession. But the store’s sales of items the money borrowers lost when they didn’t repay the loan is “not what it used to be.”

In general, I’ll do my part to help rectify that situation, now that the garage-sale season is winding down.